Competing To Be Green

The New York Times has a very cool article about college student's attempts to become green using the following logic...

“It’s not about telling people, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that...’ It’s about fitting sustainability into our own lives. [And hoping] that a friend will come over, recognize that it’s fun, start doing it, and then a friend of theirs will start doing it.”

One of the most important ideas highlighted in this article is one that I have seen with increasing frequency - that is the idea of using human nature's natural attraction to competition to increase desirable behavior. The example offered in the NYT article goes as follows...

"Lucas Brown, a junior at Oberlin College here, was still wet from the shower the other morning as he entered his score on the neon green message board next to the bathroom sink: Three minutes, according to the plastic hourglass timer inside the shower. Two minutes faster than the morning before. One minute faster than two of his housemates.

Mr. Brown, a 21-year-old economics major, recalled the marathon runner who lived in the house last semester, saying: “He came out of the shower one morning and yelled out: ‘Two minutes 18 seconds. Beat that, Lucas!’ "

But timing each others shower durations is only one way to use competition to encourage smart consumerism. People claiming bragging rights over their cars MPGs in lieu of its horsepower is another that I have both read about recently and witnessed personally. Cap and Trade policies, similarly drive at the heart of competitive non-consumerism.

The majority of American society still admires those who contribute most to the consumer cycle. The more you own - car, house, clothes, etc. - the greater your worth is and the more you are valued. But there is no real reason this has to be a conclusive means of determining worth. It could easily be argued that the more one buys the big cars, the big energy-sucking homes, the more they are mucking it all up for the rest of us and, therefore, the less we value these consumption decisions. So I would argue that the more we place ourselves into competition with each other over conscientious consumerism, the more accurately we will be able to assess at least one facet of someones true value to his or her society.